Here there be monsters.

Reading

Wilford is unaware that he has caused any drama lately. Sure, he had a little hiccup with Baze, but he's reset since then, and he doesn't even have any bruises from that little adventure. Which is great, because if he were stuck here waiting for those to fade any longer, he might have done something a lot worse than jumping out of a helicopter for the lulz.

First he heads to the bar to get some lunch and see if anything's been left for him. Getting only lunch and nothing else, he heads over to the fire to read over some notes while he eats.

The body is wrapped securely in a tarpaulin before being hoisted over her shoulder and carried through the bar, to be left in a cell. Baby, obligingly, provides a temperature-controlled environment, to slow the body becoming any more... unpleasant, and blacks out the cell walls to keep anyone else from getting a shock.

Job done, she collects a change of clothes from the Bar, and heads off for a shower: there's something about a corpse's smell that's hard to shake easily.

Back from her shower and sporting a new sky-blue Though she be but little, she be fierce t-shirt, she settles onto a high bar stool to write her note to the rest of the Security Team.

Responsibilities taken care of for the time being, Molly removes her badge - since she wasn't meant to be on duty, and she figures one dead body is enough work for one day - and resumes her interrupted relationship with her bottle of beer.

For Yamato, it's only been maybe a day since Koushiro came to his apartment, and he's still feeling -- weird over it.

In truth, the bar is the last place he wants to see right now, but he resists the urge to just turn around and walk out the other way. Instead, he makes his way over to Bar, where a cupcake with a candle in the shape of the number eighteen appears. He prods at it without eating for a while, then slides it to one side.

It probably doesn't take someone tremendously observant to notice how his shoulders are slumping, or how completely dead his eyes look.

Quentin's having a not great day, he always worries about Toby but things have been so quiet for so long, it can't last. Soon he'll have to get ready for his lessons with Etienne but for now he's eating pancakes and searching for Yamato.

Its been a while since he's seen him and then Yamato wasn't in a good place either. To keep from thinking too much, he has the TV tuned to a hockey game with teams he doesn't know. His disguise is down making his bronze hair with almost a hint of a patina and pointed ears visible while he's wearing jeans and a t-shirt that's almost the same bright blue as his eyes, May found it for him.

Cassidy wanders downstairs, wearing one of those overly dramatic howling wolf t-shirts. In pink. What? He stole borrowed it from the Lost & Found Box. If it fits, he wears it, so he's wearing it.

In any case, he needs whiskey.

He's been thinking about going back through his door so he can do the thing that he still has to do, but that can wait until after he's had his whiskey.

Then, out of sheer curiosity, he very quietly asks the Bar:

"Hey, y'know that bottled blood I've been hearin' about? Mind if I get one o' those, too?"

Sure enough, a stout bottle of TruBlood appears next to his bottle of liquor. Pulling a face, he picks it up and reads the label. And then the ingredients. And then the little blurb on the side about how it was manufactured in Japan.

Hera's in a corner booth, slowly consuming a dish that looks like spongy white meat in a thick, blue-and-green sauce. She may have spent the last twenty minutes or so quietly arguing with Kanan over whether they could afford a "real food" meal, until Kanan had agreed to an equal offset of their cantina funds.

But not long after, Kanan had left the booth to wander outside. Because mynock Nabat, while a favorite of Hera's, has a very bitter scent that humans don't usually appreciate. Cold kopi tea is more tolerable, but does nothing to lessen the dish's smell, nor the unappetizing way mynock squelches as Hera digs her spoon into it.

Outside, Kanan has walked toward the rocky side of the lake shore. It has definitely become more difficult to find quiet aboard the Ghost, and somehow he has felt caught between quickly jumping to distractions, and the pull of the Force that's only been growing stronger, With no distraction immediately apparent here, Kanan is scoping out a lonely spot among the rocks to rest.

Jim has commandeered a couple of tables over by the Window. One of them holds the practical pieces of a plan about to be put in motion - a couple of air compressors, darts, a box with vials of clear liquid, a box of wires with circuit boards and explosives - and the other is far more neat. A computer, a street map of downtown Los Santos. Also, hot chocolate and cake, because while he might have work to do, he is also in a very happy and indulgent mood, humming to himself as he alternates between high-speed typing and building bits of what will become increasingly obvious is a bomb.

He is totally botherable. He probably won't share his cake, but he can offer lots of insight into blowing things up. Far more fun.

[OOC; Warning for death by dare in the Wilford thread. Which amounts to suicide, probably.]

Wilford and Buster are at the bar, both having lunch. While Buster happily inhales his plate of chicken, Wilford isn't really paying too much attention to the soup and sandwich Bar decided to give him.

Things went not so well, and then they went even worse, leaving Wilford confused and trying to hide his bruised face behind an old pair of glasses with chunky plastic frames.

People around here don't react the way he expects them to. Wilford did everything he knows how to do to get someone to calm down - he threw money at the situation and let himself get hit in the face - but he still has the feeling he may have somehow missed an important detail. Which is weird, because those things usually work.

The first time Baze attempted a serious whittling project, he went at it recklessly.

It only took five minutes before the knife blade slipped from the wood and opened a gash in his thumb. He stubbornly continued carving, but ended up getting blood all over the balsa wood. Another ten minutes passed before the blade skipped off a knot and sliced his index finger. More blood. More carving. At that point, the wood was slippery, so he had to stop.

He applied bandages to his fingers and waited a day before trying again. But try again he did, and learned how to properly protect himself with a Bar-provided thumb pad for his blade hand.

And he learned more than that. He learned that cuts made with the grain will peel away smoothly; cuts made against the grain will give resistance and eventually split. He learned the pull stroke, the push stroke, and straight-away rough cutting. He learned to whittle slowly, to use the strokes as a meditative practice.

Though his carved fish and eggs and demon bunnies are still crude, he thinks he can whittle in his sleep.

Today he's leaning against the bar, holding a block of balsa wood in his left hand and his pocket knife in his right, with the blade facing towards him. He braces the thumb of his right hand against the wood, and squeezes his fingers in order to draw the blade towards his thumb. His strokes are short and controlled.

Alana's seated at the bar today, wearing a red Diane von Furstenberg wrap dress with black polkadots and a pair of black, high-heeled boots. She's got her bare legs crossed at the knee and her chin cupped in her hand.

She was reading Conquering Mountains: A Guide to Solo Female Travel, but now she's just people watching.

Ellen has been busy. Very busy. Post-apocalyptic Philadelphia is not the worst of cities- so far as she knows that distinction goes to Pittsburgh- but it's... well, it's still a post-apocalyptic city run by ice gangs and weirdoes and it's got mutant hippos in the rivers and there is a persistent legend that people don't try to cross the river because plants on the other side will eat them. And in her experience you can't deny that possibility. So she's been busy.

But the door opened to the Bar today, and she is grateful for any chance to be somewhere that does not smell like the shores of the Schuykill, and she will apologize to you if the attempts she has made at cleaning up and changing into her old blue Vault suit with the 101 across the back have not been enough to get the reek entirely gone. Just let her have her beer in the process, okay?